


hiraeth

by erce3



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 20:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20088022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erce3/pseuds/erce3
Summary: hir·aeth/‘hir,āeth/nouna homesickness for a home you can not return to or a home that never was.(“I’ll tell you a secret. I’m a coward.” // “I never wanted to be a hero.”Mara & Angella, stranded by the portal, alone).





	hiraeth

hir·aeth  
/‘hir,āeth/

noun  
a homesickness for a home you can not return to or a home that never was.

*

_ “I’ll tell you a secret. I’m a coward.” // “I never wanted to be a hero.” _

Angella’s eyes slide open, and the world focuses around her. Her head aches, a dull throbbing in the back of her skull. She takes a sharp breath in, surprised by the night sky dotted with stars. There are only a few wispy clouds; the air is clear. She shuts her eyes again, suddenly overwhelmed: she’s back in Etheria.

She’s back in Etheria.

Her eyes snap open and she surges forward, met with a spinning head and her vision going blurry for half a second. She takes a moment to steady herself, placing a hand over the crown of her head carefully. “Where am I?” she says, to no one in particular, and feels her wings flutter.

“Nowhere,” says a voice above her, and Angella startles, looks up to see a figure standing above her. It’s a woman, tanned skin and eyebrows drawn together, dark hair twisted up into a ponytail. She sweeps aside her bangs and peers at Angella in a melancholy way. Her eyes are sad and swimming with a kind of regret, and Angella – despite knowing that this woman isn’t as young as she appears, is young in the way _ Angella _ looks young – longs to reach out, to hold the stranger, familiar and unfamiliar both. “It happened again,” she says, simply, “didn’t it.”

Angella pauses, understands. “Mara,” she whispers, by way of answering.

Mara nods. “I’m sorry,” she says, and tears well up in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

She takes Angella to an old hut in the woods, offers her tea for her headache and a place to rest. “It’s empty here,” she tells Angella. And then, “It’s changed, though, since you – since –”

Angella nods dumbly. _ Changed. _

Mara talks as she moves around the hut, not quite chattering and not quite meaningful conversation, either. When Angella closes her eyes, Mara’s words turn to a murmur, blur together, and Angella focuses on the musical ups and downs of her tone. “I saw her,” says Mara after a while, wistful, terribly, achingly sad. “The next She-Ra. You knew her, didn’t you.” Mara has a way of not asking questions, a way of sounding old while looking in her twenties, eyes mournful and ancient but face that of a scared young adult. Angella struggles to look at her, torn between wanting to be mothered and to mother, a quiet paradox created and strung along by Mara’s eyes and the baby fat that hasn’t quite left her cheeks.

Mara seems not to notice. She’s stirring something over a fire, quiet. “It’s been a long time, Angella, since I was trapped here.” She never says anything meaningful outright; all her mutterings have much underneath them, so full of meaning that Angella will only start to understand once they have known each other for a space of time too long for each of them to count.

“A thousand years,” says Angella. Her voice cracks.

Mara’s face crumples and she nods, seems like she wants to ask a question but can’t. She chops up a root and slides it into a bubbling pot, quiet for the first time since Angella has met her. The smell of it reminds Angella how hungry she is. Her stomach growls; she slaps her hands over it as if to stifle the noise, embarrassed.

Mara smiles, just slightly. “You must be wondering where we are.”

Angella pauses and considers her words. “It’s not my first concern,” she says lightly, then wonders what her first concern is. Her daughter, alone. Her husband, gone. Adora, with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She hunches her shoulders and feels, not for the first time in her life, useless.

There’s a silence. Mara watches her, no doubt trying to read what Angella’s thinking. “I know,” she says, after a while, “the feeling.” She takes another vegetable and slices into it with her knife. “This is my friend’s home,” she says, as if she were just housesitting, not – not – Angella can’t think about it. “When the portal–” Mara pauses, like she’s trying to think of the right word, “–updated this world, I found it, and then I just knew that – that it’s hers.” She searches Angella’s face, expression shifting as if she sees something familiar, and nods again. 

Angella wonders if they’re both doomed to comb an abandoned Etheria, looking for clues that the people they love existed and continue to exist in a world separate from their own.

“Her name was Razz.”

Angella sighs into the blanket she’s been given; yes, she thinks with sudden clarity, she will search this world for signs of Glimmer until the end of time. The thought makes her ache. “Razz,” she repeats.

Mara doesn’t push her to answer the unspoken question. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “This is all my fault.”

They don’t have much meaningful conversation; Angella only really learns about Mara in bits and pieces. Only once does Mara mention that she met Adora briefly when the world was collapsing in on herself. “I was too hard on that girl,” says Angella quietly by way of response. “But – I trust her now to take care of my daughter.”

Mara smiles. “I wish I had had enough time with Razz for a daughter.”

_ Enough time. _ Angella is an immortal – she has always had enough time. And yet, thinking of Micah, realizing she will never meet any grandchildren or even see her daughter grow up, she feels tears well in her eyes when she says, “I know what you mean.” Mara sighs and puts an arm around Angella’s shoulder, otherwise silent.

“I need to visit Bright Moon,” says Angella one day. A week has passed, or maybe a month; time seems to crawl and also seems to move altogether too rapidly. 

“I see,” says Mara.

“My whole life was there.”

“I know.”

“I can’t go al–”

“I know,” says Mara, and when Angella looks at her, she’s pulling on her shoes. “I know.”

Angella remembers Bright Moon as always loud, always busy, always full of Glimmer tugging at her sleeve. This Bright Moon needs a sweeping, needs its weeds pulled, needs – she enters the throne room and sees a plant coiling around her chair, and something collapses inside of her.

She begins to weep.

It’s an impossible task, maintaining Bright Moon by herself. Mara helps, somewhat, but she’s always taking care of Razz’s cottage, and Angella _ understands, _ in the way that the first night she returns she curls into a ball and sleeps on Glimmer’s bed and _ cries, _ understands that they both are going to grieve into eternity.

“I can’t leave it behind,” says Mara when Angella offers her a room in Bright Moon, and Angella knows, intrinsically, what _ ‘it’ _ is – Etheria is frozen in time, abandoned just as Angella left it, but for Mara, there is very little left of what she remembers. A couple old temples; her ship, looted; and a hut lived in by the only woman she loved and left behind.

There’s an old toy in Glimmer’s room that Angella finds as she dusts. She doesn’t tidy, exactly – there’s something about it being lived-in and messy that makes it so much more bearable. It’s a teddy bear, without an eye, purple, and winged. An old toy Glimmer used to tote around everywhere.

She aches when she sees it.

“You’re not a failure,” says Angella to Mara as they clean. “It isn’t your fault.”

“If I had just–”

Angella crosses the room and silences Mara by slapping her hand over her mouth. “I don’t know the full story,” she says, “because Adora doesn’t tell me everything, but I do know that there would have been no She-Ra if I had not stopped Hordak.” She shudders. “If we, Etherians, had not let Shadow Weaver become what she is. My cowardice is as much at fault as you are.”

Mara blinks at her. “You are not a coward.”

“And you,” says Angella lightly, “are a hero.”

Mara laughs then, quiet and bitter and sad. “I didn’t want to sacrifice myself.”

“You just didn’t have a choice,” finishes Angella for her, and sighs into the empty halls of Bright Moon. “We just didn’t have a choice.”

Angella puts together a pack and places the teddy bear inside. When Mara appears in the morning, armed with shears to trim the shrubs, Angella stops her and hands her another pack, full of a change in clothes, rations, iodine tablets. _ I am a coward, _ she told Adora. _ I couldn’t move on. _ “We need to move on,” she tells Mara.

Mara hunches her shoulders and looks around Bright Moon. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Come with me,” says Angella. “Razz’s hut will be there when we get back.”

“Not the same.”

“No, not the same,” says Angella. “But you aren’t the same as when you were with her, either.”

They go to Salineas, and the Crimson Waste, and the Horde, and through the Whispering Woods, and wherever else they can think of – all empty, all solemn, all full of decaying ruins they will never be able to maintain. It helps, somewhat, to camp in empty fields and tell stories and forget that there is nothing to come back to.

The way Angella figures it, they have an eternity to heal. At least she doesn’t have to do it alone.

She holds Mara when Mara cries, and Mara holds her when she cries. It isn’t easy, saying goodbye to Bright Moon, just as it isn’t easy for Mara to say goodbye to Razz’s hut. They see memories of loved ones everywhere; Angella still sleeps with Glimmer’s teddy bear. But there is time for them to grow, and at least there is one other person to share that time with.

Some days Angella can’t even get out of her sleeping bag, she’s so overcome with melancholy, with unbearable grief. Those days, Mara sits beside her, and gives her tea, and doesn’t complain, just waits until Angella is ready to crawl out of bed and face an empty world again.

“Do you miss being She-Ra?” asks Angella once, curious.

“Yes,” says Mara immediately, “and no. I miss–” she flexes her fists and sighs “–I miss being powerful. But I don’t miss the responsibility.”

“I have a feeling,” Angella says lightly, “Adora would have said the same thing.”

“She has the world on her shoulders,” says Mara softly. “I left her with that.”

“I left the weight of a kingdom to my daughter,” responds Angella, and they both sigh into the nighttime and look at the stars and the smoke from their campfire that dissipates into them. _ We left, _ Angella thinks, and wants to cry again. There is nothing more cutting than the guilt of that, of knowing that she’s forcing her loved ones to live without her.

“We saved them, too, you know.”

“I thought you weren’t a hero.”

“I thought you were a coward.”

They laugh then, proper belly-laughs into the open, silent air, and something in Angella’s chest shifts. She looks at Mara laughing, shoving at Angella’s shoulder with far less grace than a princess should, and feels her sadness move – still there, but suddenly bearable in comparison to the woman beside her and the warm fire in front of her.

At some point they change their outfits. They can’t rid themselves of them – remnants of the past are too precious – but they do sew themselves pants that are easier to move in, shirts that can be breathed in. Angella starts wearing her hair in a bun piled up on her head and out of her way. Mara shears her hair short. They put away their jewelry, and keep moving.

The whole of Etheria’s theirs, and they circle it, map it, visit and revisit until they know it better than anything.

Sometimes Angella misses birdsong, misses animals. They eat the fruits and vegetables they find. “We should start farming, at some point,” says Mara.

“Can we?” says Angella, and Mara by now knows what this means: _ can we create a new home away from our old ones? Are we strong enough to yet? Have we moved on? _ They haven’t, of course – how do you build a new life out of the bones of an old one? You can’t, not when the shadows of memories always obscure the future.

“We can settle the valley beside Bright Moon,” says Mara, a place between the memories of Razz and Glimmer, and Angella nods.

Neither is sure how much time has passed. “It didn’t feel like a thousand years,” says Mara, “When I was alone. Time isn’t – it isn’t the same here.”

  
“I see,” says Angella. No way to tell how old Glimmer is, whether or not the war might be over. “I see.”

It’s a much more simple life than Angella ever expected, but peaceful, too. She learns how to make flour out of nuts that fall from the trees, and then how to make bread. They grow their own vegetables, their own fruit, their own herbs. They build their own house. At some point in time, they begin to share a bed. It’s unspoken, how they’ve come to coexist.

“Before you,” Mara tells her once, “all I knew how to do was grieve.”

  
  
“Before you,” counters Angella, “all I did was wait.”

Mara smiles and takes her in her arms, placing her chin on Angella’s shoulder. It’s enough of a confession for them, for now – they take their relationship slow: a kiss on the cheek, a murmured thank you for the company, all sparing, like by learning to love each other, they’re learning to accept their solitude.

Angella, for one, has always been a slow learner, but Mara doesn’t seem to mind. They have eternity, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> i finished s3 and wrote this in one sitting. bro im so sad. please yell at me @figbian on tumblr :-)


End file.
